Cell Phone Fun History

Fifty One years ago on 3 April 1973, Martin Cooper, a VP at Motorola, made history by placing the very first cellphone call.

Appropriately enough, he called his rival at AT&T's Bell Labs, which is globally regarded as the first public mobile phone call. And then in 2007, the iPhone took everyone by surprise. "...an iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator. Are you getting it?" a smug Steve Jobs asked a crowd in San Francisco. "These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we are calling it, iPhone. Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone… and here it is."

This occurred thirty-three years after the world's first cell phone call was made. Slightly more theatrical, Steve Jobs demonstrated his new invention by dialing a Starbucks cafe in San Francisco to order 4,000 lattes, making the first public phone call from the very first iPhone while a hushed auditorium filled with journalists watched. In between those calls, the cellphone morphed from a chunky plastic giant to a slender glass slab that doubles up as a computer and camera.

The world's first cell phone device was 9 inches tall, comprised 30 circuit boards, had a talk-time of 35 minutes, and took 10 hours to recharge. It was called "the brick" and weighed about as much. Today's iPhone 5 weighs just under 4 ounces and is not quite 5 inches tall and is under 1/3 inch thick. It is more powerful than computers used 20 years ago to run entire countries.

Today's smartphones can plan your entire schedule, record it in video or still pictures, and communicate around the world in many different ways. But even more exciting innovations, like phones that maybe wrap around our wrist and read our feelings from our voice, are right around the corner.

Revolutionary technology often takes a while to gain momentum, but once it does, the world changes.

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